“Nostalgia is rarely antiquarian, a mere interest in history qua history. It is more commonly a sentimental pining for “the way it was.” Such nostalgia is always a form of arrested development. For example, there are sorts of nostalgia that are not-so-subtle longings for adolescence and thus resent adulthood. Many forms of collective nostalgia demonize the present while luxuriating in a fabled past. (As Tony Soprano once put it, “‘ Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”) But in most cases, and in our collective life, nostalgia usually serves a social and political agenda that wants to reprise a configuration of society that secured a way of life that is being romanticized. All too often, that way of life benefited some—who now remember it fondly—at the expense of others who were ground underfoot by the so-called golden age. In the United States, for example, only white people, most likely men, could recall the 1950s with a rosy glow.”

— How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now by James K. A. Smith
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